Hollywood

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Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant in "The Pride and the Passion," 1957.CreditAssociated Press

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Dec. 5, 2014

When did self-proclaimed movie geekdom supplant fandom as a badge of superior commitment to cinema love? Being more fan than geek and therefore not beholden to quantifiable research, I blithely estimate that the mutation began about the time Darth Vader first started wearing his CPAP machine around the house and frightening the children. Geekdom was born under the moon of the modern Hollywood blockbuster era and nurtured by the simultaneous development of home computers and cable television — which in turn begat the Internet, TCM, Fandango and trivia-enhanced moviegoing life as we know it. Fans may be happy with publicity stills, but geeks want content, and context too. Fans may enjoy autographs, but geeks demand Reddit Ask Me Anything threads.

In our time, geekdom — once popularly viewed as a social deficiency with no subterranean cachet of cool attached — has become a club to which even the popular kids clamor for membership. Entry is granted through the gates of Twitter, the IMDb forest of factoids, the Box Office Mojo vault of knowledge. Movie geeks want statistics about ticket sales and the number of takes expended for each scene of a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher. They want aspect ratio specs and access to multiple drafts of shooting scripts. Movie geeks thrive on argument and think in lists: Who or what was the best, the worst, the most (sadly) overrated or (criminally) underrated? Which movies before 1968 have an animal or body part in the title? And they want personal details. They are hungry not so much for gossip about sex lives of the stars (although that, too, is entered into the mental database) as for the scoop on how the affair between X and Y or the drug use of Z affected the production schedules of Projects A, B and C. Which then bumped releases back. Which sent Oscar strategists scurrying to devise new awards-season campaigns. Which involved underdog positioning and a subtweet whisper attack maligning the political inclinations of the star of Project D.

Movie geeks will thumb through ONE LUCKY BASTARD: Tales From Tinseltown (Lyons Press, $26.95), by Roger Moore with Gareth Owen, and YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: My Life (Atria, $28), by Sophia Loren, with the kind of indulgent pat on the shoulder given to Grandma as she demonstrates her Jitterbug flip phone. This pair of slight, late-life macramé projects — a loose collection of Hollywood anecdotes from 87-year-old Moore and a gentle autobiographical sketch from 80-year-old Loren — are best bought by and for classic fans.

Both authors have already delighted their respective bases with previous volumes of similar provenance. The urbanely British Moore — seven times the big-screen embodiment of Her Majesty’s secret agent James Bond between 1973 and 1985, making him a record-holder for the gig — published his autobiography, “My Word Is My Bond,” in 2008, as well as two books of Bondiana. The voluptuously Italian Loren — winner of the 1962 Oscar for best actress (in “Two Women”) and an honorary Oscar in 1991 — collaborated with A. E. Hotchner on “Sophia. Living and Loving: Her Own Story,” published in 1979, and has her byline attached to a book about beauty and one of “recipes and memories.” There is no story in either of these volumes that will appreciably deepen or broaden what a fan already knows and presumably loves about each of these old-time stars. Instead, the books are valedictory extensions of personal brand.

In the case of Moore, that brand is a debonair chap about town, so well connected after decades of Hollywood high life that he can now rattle off stories that didn’t even happen to him, but instead were told to him by various other chaps about town. Here is a raconteur so jolly about his long career that he actually refers to show business as “the business we call ‘show.’ ” The work, he writes, in a flourish of palaver, is “always interesting, often challenging and if Lady Luck favors us, and benevolent producers take pity on us, then it’s quite possible to make a living out of doing something really enjoyable.”

The fellow who writes this lulling chitchat is a little cheeky, a bit droll. And for fans more tickled by Lady Luck stuff than I am, that may be enough. Published in Britain as “Last Man Standing,” the book meanders through stories about old-school players including Lana Turner (“another wonderful actress and feisty lady”), John Gielgud (whose “continuing gaffs really were the stuff of legend”) and Sammy Davis Jr. (“a hugely funny man”). “One Lucky Bastard” probably goes down best when read at a bar, book in one hand and something shaken-not-stirred in the other.

For her part of the act, Loren works the Italian grandma angle with endearing theatricality. As a framing device, she establishes her reminiscences as memories summoned before nodding off to sleep, having spent the day cooking Christmas recipes with her grandchildren. (Attenzione, professional Italian nonna/cookbook star Lidia Bastianich, you’ve got competition.) Loren’s stories are unfailingly sweet, modest, patient. “The ugly duckling was turning into a swan,” she notes about her girlhood, with becoming understatement. “We pinched each other’s cheeks to make sure we weren’t dreaming,” she says about arriving in Los Angeles for the first time in 1957 as an international movie star, with her younger sister, Maria, as her companion.

And for fans more tickled by cheek-pinching stuff than I am, this, too, is surely enough. Aside from a steady, controlled burn of anger at the bounder father who never did right by Loren’s mother — young, unwed and miserably poor, Romilda Villani raised Sofia (as her name was then spelled) and Maria, with crucial help from her own mother — the memoirist is in a magnanimously reflective mood. When, at the age of 17, she met 39-year-old Carlo Ponti, who would become her producer, her Pygmalion and eventually her husband (after headlines had proclaimed their relationship a scandal and after popular, church and state condemnation), she explains that “I had the strange impression that he’d understood me, that behind my impetuous beauty he had read the traces of a reserved personality, my difficult past, my great longing to be successful, seriously and with passion.” She is gracious about her own success, and protective about her family. She is also tender about the other men who affected her life, both personally as well as professionally — never more so than about Cary Grant, with whom she became close during the making of “The Pride and the Passion” in 1957, and who (despite being married to his third wife, Betsy Drake, at the time) proposed marriage. “I knew that my place was next to Carlo,” she writes. “At the same time, it was hard to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was willing to give up everything for me.”

Loren and Grant remained lifelong friends. So move right along, movie geeks, there is nothing to gawp at here. This is a story that rewards nice readers who are contented to give lovers some privacy, even if they happen to be movie stars.

Geek-style collectors of stories and stats will feel much more at home with DE NIRO: A Life (Crown Archetype, $32.50), by the film critic and movie journalist Shawn Levy, or WATCH ME: A Memoir (Scribner, $27.99), the second volume of memoirs by Anjelica Huston. The two books couldn’t be farther apart in tone and intention: “De Niro” is a highly researched, analytical study of the life and work of one of the greatest actors of his generation; “Watch Me” is a personal narrative by a charismatic 63-year-old woman and child of Hollywood whose own creative identity has, for much of her life, been defined by her relationship to powerful men — including but not limited to the director John Huston (her father) and to the actor Jack Nicholson (her on-and-off beau for some 17 years). Yet together, both books reflect prevailing modern approaches to writing about movies, Hollywood and, my dears, the business we call show.

Levy faces a couple of challenges well: For one, his is hardly the first, nor is it very likely to be the last, biographical study of the now 71-year-old De Niro, who is as famous for his personal impenetrability and conversational reticence as for his towering public performances in American cinema masterpieces including “Mean Streets,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather II.” What’s more, the book is “unauthorized,” in that the actor repeatedly declined to be interviewed, and as a result, so did many others who have known him over the years. “However,” Levy sensibly explains, “as I often remind people, unauthorized doesn’t mean salacious, and it is entirely possible to write a full and fair biography without ever speaking to the subject.”

“Robert De Niro: A Life” is full and fair, and in his role as critic, Levy states his operating P.O.V. clearly at the top: It is sometimes difficult “to see De Niro’s early glories through what had become the muddle of his later career.” Yet, Levy continues, “every time he appears before us, no matter the costume, the voice, the name, the story, there he is, stark and plain before the world.” And so, armed with scholarship culled from studying De Niro’s archives, along with insights gained from interviewees unconstrained by omertà, Levy (who has previously written books about challenging showbiz types including Paul Newman, Jerry Lewis and the Sinatra-era Rat Pack) has created a thorough, measured, fact-filled, 600-page, movie-by-movie, girlfriend-by-girlfriend study that is right up a movie geek’s alley. The trade-off is that the thoroughness of all those facts, in all those pages, may cause a casual fan’s eyes to glaze over.

The steady, measured pace of “De Niro” contrasts with the page-turning trot of “Watch Me.” While Levy proceeds at the deliberate tempo of an anthropologist, Huston glides around like a nightclub singer with an interesting, erratic set list, singing some blues, some power ballads, a torch song or two, and Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” as a closer. And this, too, is a phenomenon of the contemporary era of movie geekdom: A memoirist can swing a little, pull some attitude, narrate selectively, and her readers will only appreciate her more for her confidence.

Huston’s first volume, “A Story Lately Told,” covered her childhood, her teens in London and her relationship in New York with the photographer Bob Richardson. “Watch Me” picks up with the good stuff — life in Los Angeles, Nicholson, her work in “Prizzi’s Honor,” her sometimes violent romance with Ryan O’Neal and her marriage to the sculptor Robert Graham, from 1992 until his death in 2008. Huston names names, rewards friends, settles scores and powers her way through sentences with a bluntness that might daunt a more tentative dame. Like this: “Even though Warren Beatty was one of his best friends, I wasn’t recognizing Jack as a world-class philanderer at the time.” Or this: “Everyone was getting high in my circle. Coke and grass were ubiquitous.”

From a lady simultaneously so real, tough, vulnerable, privileged and candid, I want to hear whatever she wants to tell me, up to and including a description of every designer dress she ever wore. Because, reading “Watch Me,” I become as engrossed as a dork attending Comic Con, a film studies student at a Czech cinema series at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater or a feminist movie critic who blogs at length about the male gaze as it applies to the oeuvre of Judd Apatow and Jon Favreau.

None of whom, by the way, may be hard-core enough to survive the ultra geekdom of HOW STAR WARS CONQUERED THE UNIVERSE: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, $28.99), by Chris Taylor. Here, finally, is a book that, in its very title, separates the tough from the wusses when it comes to exactly the kind of pop-culture consumption, digestion, regurgitation and entrail-reading that began with George Lucas’s space fairy tale. The amusingly hyperbolic (but serious) title, with its cheerily fevered (but serious) assumption of agreement with the premise and delightfully blinkered (but serious) conviction in the importance of the topic, distills everything one needs to know about the kind of insanely microresearched and breezily written book this is. The British-born Taylor, the deputy editor of the website Mashable, is partial to hey bro! statements like “Do not try this at home,” “R2-D2 is the man” and “As 1976 dawned, Lucas found himself the ringleader in a circus of genius, the head of one of those once-in-a-generation teams of fiery young turks eager to prove themselves.”

Taylor is also impressively committed to, as he calls it, his “biography of the franchise that turned Planet Earth into Planet ‘Star Wars.’ ” Searching for somebody, somewhere, who has never seen and knows nothing about the franchise, Taylor visits a settlement of Navajo people in Arizona and unspools a print of the movie dubbed in the Navajo language. I’m not sure this proves anything, but it does allow him to take a nice trip to the Southwest, meet some elders and teach “Star Wars” readers about the Navajo code talkers of World War II.

True movie geeks get a meta high from the giddy knowledge that they are being obsessive even while they are being obsessive. And they are nothing if not excited to hang out with others who share their particular subspecialty passions — whether for pre-Code films, Iranian cinema, Blaxploitation flicks, Robert De Niro or Anjelica Huston. I reckon there are millions, or at least thousands, who will be eager to go where Taylor goes, probing the secret corners of the galaxy invented by George Lucas and his fiery young turks.

And if I am not among them, don’t be alarmed. There is a new book out called CHARLIE CHAPLIN: A Brief Life (Doubleday, $25.95), by the award-winning British writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd, and it is quietly enthralling. It is, as advertised, concise. It assumes basic familiarity with “the first human being ever to be the object of global adulation far beyond the later cult of ‘celebrity.’ ” (Taylor the “Star Wars” scholar might have had an even harder time finding somebody, somewhere, who has never heard of Chaplin.) Ackroyd’s Chaplin is a not-very-nice man, he is hell to work with, he is an incorrigible womanizer (of very young women) with a “priapic reputation,” a bad husband, self-absorbed, moody, known for his “meanness” and “stinginess” and a devastatingly effective artist. Ackroyd’s coolly perceptive literary style and equally devastatingly effective observations suggest that he doesn’t care a fig about pleasing geeks or fans or anyone else.

I have become a groupie.

Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.